Dan Morrill decided to take the Garduino system that he built a step further, and created a remote control that runs on an Android phone and talks to the Arduino over Bluetooth:
In practice, it takes your “Serial.print” output from an Arduino program and makes it available over Bluetooth to a PC….. or a phone. Android, meanwhile, added an API for Bluetooth RFCOMM in version 2.0. My wife got me a BlueSMiRF for my birthday, and it was off to the races.
I rewrote the Arduino code into a simple finite state machine, and added the ability to accept commands over serial. It’s a very simple project, so there are only 2 commands: reset, and set current time. I encountered some interesting open-source related issues in doing this, but that’s another post.
I then wrote a spiffy little Android app that pairs up to the BlueSMiRF, reads the state dumped from the Arduino every 3 seconds, and then makes a pretty little Android UI. It shows me a Sun, Moon, or Clock depending on which state the Arduino is in (daytime, nighttime, or waiting for clock data), and reports the other status fields like light intensity and status.
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